Having a (LAN) Party: What is it?

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When Sam Cooke wrote the old R&B number “Having a Party”, he probably never envisioned Unreal Tournament.

Playing anonymous opponents over the Internet is fun, but it pales in comparison to facing down your opponents in person, seeing them sweat, and reveling in their cries of anguish as you pummel them mercilessly. Or maybe you want to gang up on the computer, playing “co-op” in games that support that feature. In either case, it’s time for a LAN party!

Face it; we are social animals, and for as much as any of us like playing online, it’s never as visceral an experience as playing in the same room with friends or cohorts. A LAN party isn’t just about gaming, but it’s about the shared experiences during the gaming. After the party, people hang around and talk about the best moments during the sessions. Sometimes they talk about it for weeks afterwards. The water cooler effect of popular TV shows pale in comparison.

What it is

A LAN party is a collective gathering of PC gamers in a common location. A participant brings his gaming rig with him (or her) to a common location and connects it to a temporary LAN that’s set up just for the event. The duration is usually a weekend or holiday period. The scale can vary from a few people in a basement to huge venues involving hundreds of PCs.

The LAN party is nothing new. Quite a few years ago, I played Maze Wars on an Appletalk network on a bunch of monochrome Macintoshes–there were no color Macs at the time. Not long after that, Falcon 3.0 brought together virtual squadron gatherings for a weekend of campaigning in the modern jet sim era. Later, Doom parties were held when id released its groundbreaking action game.

However, the advent of cheap networking hardware, the explosion of multiplayer games and the Internet has created grassroots movement that dwarfs the ad-hoc LAN parties of recent history. It may seem odd that the Internet would give a boost to LAN parties. After all, isn’t the Internet the medium for multiplayer games?

In a word, no.

Yes, you can play multiplayer games over the net. Thousands do, every day. For people in remote locations, it may be the only way to play against other people. It’s relatively low on the effort scale, too–you don’t need to pack your PC up and carry it somewhere. But the Internet is also anonymous, a haven for cheaters and quite simply, not as visceral an experience. On top of that, technical issues often create frustrations that make gameplay annoying or impossible. High lag time results in “warping” of opponents so that you miss when you shouldn’t–and get hit when it seems impossible. The culprit here is lag time, which is the time it takes data packets to travel between your system and the game server. Even a lowly 10Mbit/sec Ethernet LAN has minimal lag time–usually well under 40 milliseconds, and 40 milliseconds is about the best you’d see on a fast broadband connection over the Internet on a game server that’s not too many server hops away.

Havin’ a Party

For our purposes, we’re going to focus on smaller parties–30 players or less. At around thirty players, the scale of the event increases in a stepwise manner, and your LAN party suddenly becomes a major convention. At the end, we’ll offer a few tips for anyone mad enough to want to host a really large event, but for now, let’s focus on more intimate events.

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